Howdy boys and girls, Cletus here trying out his skills in the art of drawing!
After my trial of Photoshop nearly ending after 30 days, i figured i might make some good use of it before the end times.
I'm not trying make anything of good taste as of now, just practicing how to use photoshop most efficiently, practice
anatomy and especially coloring in my work.
Right now i have a piece that needs correct shading and coloring, i'll just post that first and post my progress later on.
If anyone knows of a very good tutorial that helps with coloring and such, it'd be greatly appreciated.
I know you might find me a lazy asshole for not googling myself, but it's just that there's allot of tutorials out there and
i just can't find one that suits my taste of coloring/shading style.
If you see some things that could have done better in this half-done piece, just tell me aight?

I'm still learning myself, but I'd say your anatomy needs work. As the old adage goes, no amount of shading and tone can save a drawing with bad proportions... or something like that. However, bad is a strong word. If both anatomy and color are your goals, I suggest starting with some gesture drawings, then after you can worry about adding color.

The best way to shade is to first decide where your light is coming from. Imagine it like a hose of water shooting out. The things that get hit straight on become brighest, whilst the things down the side only get a trickle of light. The parts where the water/light cannot reach become darkest, because there is less light to reveal them. You gotta pretend your drawing occupies a 3 dimensional space.

Good luck! Remember the most natural light sources come from above. All light sources reveal the saturation of the colour (how colourful it is) whilst bits in the shadows are less saturated (closer to grey). Just mark out on your drawing with highlights where the light will hit hardest, then mark out on your drawing where the light fails or struggles to hit. That is the essence of shading, as far as I see it. Good luck!

At 12/26/12 04:07 PM, wankwest wrote:
Thanks for the advice, i definitely should try marking light sources before shading, never came around doing it because i'm such a lazy asshole.

Ok lets start again... i dont know if this is the finish result you are going for... so i will try my best :3

Left picture <- Quick sketch
Middle picture - Added details and light
Right picture -> what you did

you need to work on the form a lot more. unless your going for an extreme style where the figure is elongated or styled such as cartoonists or figurative drawings. you need to keep everything realistic as possible... of course you dont need to be spot on but the closer it is the less strange it will look.

a quick overview is that the waist is far to thin and too high up, the arms are out of proportion and the head is too big along with the breasts which are like bowling balls. there's a lot of things wrong with it. its all very fun to color things in and make it pretty. but without the core work done your just going to be coloring a broken picture.

try to get some ground work sketches down before developing the picture and wasting time.

i'm not going to patronize you and say this is good. it isn't.

so we have some options, you can take on board what people are saying and improve and become a better artist over time. these things dont happen over night.
you can ignore what we are saying and develop on your own which may take longer but develop by yourself.
or you can just treat this as a fun activity and not take it anywhere further.

i however do look forward to watching you improve if you choose either of the first two.

At 12/27/12 08:20 AM, wankwest wrote:
Drawing someone's character in my 'style' from that one other thread.
Going for a more realistic approach than with my last drawing.

The biggest thing I saw about this is that it feels very unnatural; a person would would be very uncomfortable and strained actually sitting like that. The biggest reason behind it I think is the way you drew her right arm and left leg. I think that the right arm should be more relaxed and in the background(if not at all) and the left leg should be at a front view or cross-legged.

Some other nitpicks:

Head should be smaller
Waist should be bigger
position of left hand also feels off
mouth seems lop-sided

You're definitely improving. Some things to remember are that the nipples should be aligned with the eyes, and the eyes should generally be a distance of one eye's width apart. Also, I don't think anyone mentioned the hands being too small in your last drawing. In light of that, the hands should be roughly as large as the height of the face.

The forearms are too narrow, and the belly button is too high. It seems to me like the entire body is too long.

A general note on shading: avoid using the smudge tool for any kind of blending. It makes it look flat and, well, smudgy. Pick your colors individually to create a gradient, and never just use the same hue at different values. Always have your highlights and your shadows be of different hues than your mid tone. Otherwise, the whole thing looks flat. It doesn't need to be drastic.

Also, on the picture of the girl with the goggles, the left hand is backwards. The thumb should be above the fingers.

Three things I think about when drawing. What is gravity affecting, and where dem' ribs and butt at. (ribcage + pelvis cage). I'm still learning all this myself, so by no means do I claim to know what I'm doing/talking about.. but it sort of works for me and I hope it can work for you.

I have to say I very much like how you're trying out all sorts of styles and taking advice to heart. It certainly gives us a nice overview of your abilities so far! Before I start critiques, I'm going to drop a quick technical hint first: Try not to leave a foot off your character. In any drawing, but especially full poses, take the paper you need.

I prefer your reporter over Idioteque's 'remastering'. No offense, Idioteque, but it's a completely different style and nothing to do with what you've drawn. Wankwest's is very expressive (I especially love the hand) and would make for an awesome piece if it got finished. Right now, it's but a sketch. However, I don't think I like your colouring very much. It's all really basic, colourbook-in-between-the-lines and safe and it simply doesn't fit the core drawing which is very playful and broken.

Another thing I would like to see you do is more defined noses (and overall experiment with the faces more). It's easy to draw a quick V for a nose but there's infinitely more ways of drawing those. That's possibly more personal choice, but worth trying out at least.

Lastly, keep posting! Can't wait to see more :D

A rather disgusting-looking git that should have been disposed of ages ago.

At 1/2/13 10:31 AM, test-object wrote:
However, I don't think I like your colouring very much. It's all really basic, colourbook-in-between-the-lines and safe and it simply doesn't fit the core drawing which is very playful and broken.

Thanks for the feedback on the sketch guys.
Even though i don't reply to everyone, i do try to put all the advice i get to good use.

Maybe some may not consider this new piece as good yet, i'm actually really proud of the shading on this.
I used allot of pictures as reference for details on how the shadows fall, helped me a whole lot.
Also removed the nipples because i want to keep this thread SLIGHTLY suitable for work.
I still have to make a background and i'm making a big red ribbon surrounding the character.

Definitely nice job on the shading. You did well isolating your light source and making sure that all of the shadows fall in the right places. You didn't fall into the trap of making everything a cylinder; you've accurately portrayed the planes of the human body, and you've given her form. Only three things I would note: first, you seem to have ambient lighting on the left hip, which is good, but you don't have it on the left arm above it, which looks a bit odd. Second, you haven't given the same attention to the eyes. Consider that eyes are spheres, and if you have a light source coming from the right, there should be shadows on the left halves of the eyes, especially on the left eye, which is in the shadow of the face. Lastly, you should consider doing some studies of noses. Her nose here doesn't have any form, and the shadow shouldn't start so far to the left. As it is, the shadows imply that her nose is located below her right eye, which I'm assuming was not your intention.

Anatomy point: you have no definition where the knee is. If you look at anyone's leg, you'll see that there are quite a few curves to note even on the skinniest of people.

Alright; I'm not the greatest, especially with people, but to a good extent I know my way around some shading and at the very least, theory.

A lot of your shading in the nude picture was good, but the torso kinda stood out to me. Your lighting on the torso seems a little more all over the place... so I showed you what a cross section would look like with your shading... in the red box. In the green box, I have taken a cross section of what the torso would look like with my style of shading.

My fix doesn't look the best, I don't have a photo editing program on this PC, so I did it in paint, but you should be able to get the jist of it.

Your shading is whats going to give the allusion of shape, contours, etc.

I know the human body isn't a perfect oval, but what this is showing you is that you need to soften up your shading... in the middle of the torso, you have a very distinct line in the darker and lighter sides... that's pointy. Soften it to smooth the shape, it'll look much better in my opinion.

You may want to keep in mind that realism MAY not be your style. Your problem lies in technique, don't force yourself into something you don't want to do. The latest drawing really has a lot of issues because I believe you're betraying yourself. Personally, I still like your mushroom and sunflower doodle the most.

I'll try to make some tweaks with the lighting
around the face and left elbow. i admit, i was pretty hasty with coloring the face. I do think the cheeks could use a little more shine too. About the nose, i did intend to put the nose a bit more on the left for that anime-ish effect that the nose kind-of points forward like that of a mouse. I'll try out different styles to make realistic facial features for the next drawings.
I'm too lazy to add a knee, so i'll just be more careful not to miss things like that in my next drawing.

Migashi:
You're right about the shading, i'm still trying out new ways of shading and this is my first drawing with that style.
By softening you mean adding more layers of colors to make the transition from dark-to-light and light-to-dark less noticeable right? Or do i use the blur tool or something else? I'm guessing the first one.

Test-object:
I'm aware that my style is in a bit of an identity crisis with the simplified black lining i do, it's just that i'm still
trying things out. I think i'm going to use colored lines instead of the black ones and i'll try adding allot more detail to it.
I'm not trying to create incredibly human-like realism, but i am trying to make correct anatomy with a colorful and slightly-cartoonish look to it, A bit like anime. I'll try to add more realistic facial features for my next drawing however.

At 1/3/13 07:09 AM, wankwest wrote:
Migashi:
You're right about the shading, i'm still trying out new ways of shading and this is my first drawing with that style.
By softening you mean adding more layers of colors to make the transition from dark-to-light and light-to-dark less noticeable right? Or do i use the blur tool or something else? I'm guessing the first one.

Definitely the first one, and try to make slight variations to the colors that you use, as well. Consider that colors have low saturation in the shadows, higher saturation in the mid tones, and medium saturation in the highlights.